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Presented without comment #25

It turns out that the nuclear weapons complex simply doesn’t do “full cost accounting.” If you build a municipal solid waste facility, for example, the “back end” costs are part of the consideration. After all, part of the cost of any activity is cleaning up after one’s self (or one’s generation). That’s not, apparently, true for nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons facilities. The cost estimates for RNEP and RRW, for instance, only described what it might cost to make the weapons. Not what it might cost to take them apart someday. The same goes for all the big ticket infrastructure items in the Obama Administration’s modernization of the nuclear weapons complex like the Uranium Processing Facility. The clean-up costs get passed along to the future, quite possibly including individuals born after the weapons or facilities were retired.

Of course, that’s bad management and, from a generational perspective, a little selfish. It is irresponsible for policymakers to simply pay for the construction of nuclear weapons and related facilities, while leaving dismantlement and clean-up costs to future generations.

These differences are even more apparent in digital and online forms as we write for some kind of audience beyond ourselves, thereby revealing acts of performance. This can be more pronounced when others get involved as not only an audience but also as contributors and even co-authors on a text, which is a term still seeing change in the moves toward online compositions. In moving online, we find other people placing demands, but the technologies we use do, too. Just as page in my Field Notes memo book invites me to write, various and sundry social media tools ask me to create, discuss, promote, and measure.

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Part of what’s revealed in certain research in digital rhetoric, too, is the impermanence of our discourse. With changes and subsequent questions swirling about the nature of academic and literary publishing, we see plenty of consternation and worry about the future. The recent inclusion of Twitter hashtags in my memo books for archival organizing purposes marks another change, perhaps potential fuel for the fires burning down the English language. Still, I think much of what we have online now is what Sirc hopes for: “writing as assemblage, with a structure based on association and implication; piling stuff on to create a spellbinding, mesmerizing surface” (284).

Sexism in games remains an unsolved problem, it’s clear. Some of you will be nodding along, and some of you will hear the s-word and roll your eyes and go, “oh, this again?” You guys can piss off-–go click on some new screenshots or a trailer consisting of a release date slowly fading into view. You’re hopeless.